Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Peter Kropotkin
1902

Chapter 5
MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY

Growth of authority in Barbarian Society. -- Serfdom in the
villages. -- Revolt of fortified towns: their liberation; their
charts. -- The guild. -- Double origin of the free medieval city.
-- Self-jurisdiction, self-administration. -- Honourable position
of labour. -- Trade by the guild and by the city.
Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such
inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we
discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each
other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern
research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that
since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to
agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea
of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For
thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men
together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose
it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of
mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened
by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the
separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old
unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its
principle -- the village community -- was called into existence
by the social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men
together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further
develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the
darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose
aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step
in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social
institutions, several of which have survived down to the present
time. We have now to follow the further developments of the same
ever-living tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village
communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were
making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman
Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable
wants of the masses in the middle ages, and especially in the
medieval guilds and the medieval city.
Far from being the fighting animals they have often been
compared to, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era
(like so many Mongolians, Africans, Arabs, and so on, who still
continue in the same barbarian stage) invariably preferred peace
to war. With the exception of a few tribes which had been driven
during the great migrations into unproductive deserts or
highlands, and were thus compelled periodically to prey upon
their better-favoured neighbours -- apart from these, the great
bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and
so on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered
abodes, reverted to the spade or to their herds. The earliest
barbarian codes already represent to us societies composed of
peaceful agricultural communities, not hordes of men at war with
each other. These barbarians covered the country with villages
and farmhouses;1 they cleared the forests, bridged the
torrents, and colonized the formerly quite uninhabited
wilderness; and they left the uncertain warlike pursuits to
brotherhoods, scholae, or "trusts" of unruly men, gathered round
temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their
adventurous spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare
for the protection of populations, only too anxious to be left in
peace. The warrior bands came and went, prosecuting their family
feuds; but the great mass continued to till the soil, taking but
little notice of their would-be rulers, so long as they did not
interfere with the independence of their village communities.2
The new occupiers of Europe evolved the systems of land tenure
and soil culture which are still in force with hundreds of
millions of men; they worked out their systems of compensation
for wrongs, instead of the old tribal blood-revenge; they learned
the first rudiments of industry; and while they fortified their
villages with palisaded walls, or erected towers and earthen
forts whereto to repair in case of a new invasion, they soon
abandoned the task of defending these towers and forts to those
who made of war a speciality.
The very peacefulness of the barbarians, certainly not their
supposed warlike instincts, thus became the source of their
subsequent subjection to the military chieftains. It is evident
that the very mode of life of the armed brotherhoods offered them
more facilities for enrichment than the tillers of the soil could
find in their agricultural communities. Even now we see that
armed men occasionally come together to shoot down Matabeles and
to rob them of their droves of cattle, though the Matabeles only
want peace and are ready to buy it at a high price. The scholae
of old certainly were not more scrupulous than the scholae of our
own time. Droves of cattle, iron (which was extremely costly at
that time3), and slaves were appropriated in this way; and
although most acquisitions were wasted on the spot in those
glorious feasts of which epic poetry has so much to say -- still
some part of the robbed riches was used for further enrichment.
There was plenty of waste land, and no lack of men ready to till
it, if only they could obtain the necessary cattle and
implements. Whole villages, ruined by murrains, pests, fires, or
raids of new immigrants, were often abandoned by their
inhabitants, who went anywhere in search of new abodes. They
still do so in Russia in similar circumstances. And if one of the
hirdmen of the armed brotherhoods offered the peasants some
cattle for a fresh start, some iron to make a plough, if not the
plough itself, his protection from further raids, and a number of
years free from all obligations, before they should begin to
repay the contracted debt, they settled upon the land. And when,
after a hard fight with bad crops, inundations and pestilences,
those pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into servile
obligations towards the protector of the territory. Wealth
undoubtedly did accumulate in this way, and power always follows
wealth.4 And yet, the more we penetrate into the life of those
times, the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, the more we
see that another element, besides wealth and military force, was
required to constitute the authority of the few. It was an
element of law and tight, a desire of the masses to maintain
peace, and to establish what they considered to be justice, which
gave to the chieftains of the scholae -- kings, dukes, knyazes,
and the like -- the force they acquired two or three hundred
years later. That same idea of justice, conceived as an adequate
revenge for the wrong done, which had grown in the tribal stage,
now passed as a red thread through the history of subsequent
institutions, and, much more even than military or economic
causes, it became the basis upon which the authority of the kings
and the feudal lords was founded.
In fact, one of the chief preoccupations of the barbarian
village community always was, as it still is with our barbarian
contemporaries, to put a speedy end to the feuds which arose from
the then current conception of justice. When a quarrel took
place, the community at once interfered, and after the folkmote
had heard the case, it settled the amount of composition
(wergeld) to be paid to the wronged person, or to his family, as
well as the fred, or fine for breach of peace, which had to be
paid to the community. Interior quarrels were easily appeased in
this way. But when feuds broke out between two different tribes,
or two confederations of tribes, notwithstanding all measures
taken to prevent them,5 the difficulty was to find an arbiter
or sentence-finder whose decision should be accepted by both
parties alike, both for his impartiality and for his knowledge of
the oldest law. The difficulty was the greater as the customary
laws of different tribes and confederations were at variance as
to the compensation due in different cases. It therefore became
habitual to take the sentence-finder from among such families, or
such tribes, as were reputed for keeping the law of old in its
purity; of being versed in the songs, triads, sagas, etc., by
means of which law was perpetuated in memory; and to retain law
in this way became a sort of art, a "mystery," carefully
transmitted in certain families from generation to generation.
Thus in Iceland, and in other Scandinavian lands, at every
Allthing, or national folkmote, a lövsögmathr used to recite the
whole law from memory for the enlightening of the assembly; and
in Ireland there was, as is known, a special class of men reputed
for the knowledge of the old traditions, and therefore enjoying a
great authority as judges.6 Again, when we are told by the
Russian annals that some stems of North-West Russia, moved by the
growing disorder which resulted from "clans rising against
clans," appealed to Norman varingiar to be their judges and
commanders of warrior scholae; and when we see the knyazes, or
dukes, elected for the next two hundred years always from the
same Norman family, we cannot but recognize that the Slavonians
trusted to the Normans for a better knowledge of the law which
would be equally recognized as good by different Slavonian kins.
In this case the possession of runes, used for the transmission
of old customs, was a decided advantage in favour of the Normans;
but in other cases there are faint indications that the "eldest"
branch of the stem, the supposed motherbranch, was appealed to to
supply the judges, and its decisions were relied upon as
just;7 while at a later epoch we see a distinct tendency
towards taking the sentence-finders from the Christian clergy,
which, at that time, kept still to the fundamental, now
forgotten, principle of Christianity, that retaliation is no act
of justice. At that time the Christian clergy opened the churches
as places of asylum for those who fled from blood revenge, and
they willingly acted as arbiters in criminal cases, always
opposing the old tribal principle of life for life and wound for
wound. In short, the deeper we penetrate into the history of
early institutions, the less we find grounds for the military
theory of origin of authority. Even that power which later on
became such a source of oppression seems, on the contrary, to
have found its origin in the peaceful inclinations of the masses.
In all these cases the fred, which often amounted to half the
compensation, went to the folkmote, and from times immemorial it
used to be applied to works of common utility and defence. It has
still the same destination (the erection of towers) among the
Kabyles and certain Mongolian stems; and we have direct evidence
that even several centuries later the judicial fines, in Pskov
and several French and German cities, continued to be used for
the repair of the city walls.1 It was thus quite natural that
the fines should be handed over to the sentence-finder, who was
bound, in return, both to maintain the schola of armed men to
whom the defence of the territory was trusted, and to execute the
sentences. This became a universal custom in the eighth and ninth
centuries, even when the sentence-finder was an elected bishop.
The germ of a combination of what we should now call the judicial
power and the executive thus made its appearance. But to these
two functions the attributions of the duke or king were strictly
limited. He was no ruler of the people -- the supreme power still
belonging to the folkmote -- not even a commander of the popular
militia; when the folk took to arms, it marched under a separate,
also elected, commander, who was not a subordinate, but an equal
to the king.9 The king was a lord on his personal domain only.
In fact, in barbarian language, the word konung, koning, or
cyning synonymous with the Latin rex, had no other meaning than
that of a temporary leader or chieftain of a band of men. The
commander of a flotilla of boats, or even of a single pirate
boat, was also a konung, and till the present day the commander
of fishing in Norway is named Not-kong -- "the king of the
nets."10 The veneration attached later on to the personality
of a king did not yet exist, and while treason to the kin was
punished by death, the slaying of a king could be recouped by the
payment of compensation: a king simply was valued so much more
than a freeman.11 And when King Knu (or Canute) had killed one
man of his own schola, the saga represents him convoking his
comrades to a thing where he stood on his knees imploring pardon.
He was pardoned, but not till he had agreed to pay nine times the
regular composition, of which one-third went to himself for the
loss of one of his men, one-third to the relatives of the slain
man, and one-third (the fred) to the schola.12 In reality, a
complete change had to be accomplished in the current
conceptions, under the double influence of the Church and the
students of Roman law, before an idea of sanctity began to be
attached to the personality of the king.
However, it lies beyond the scope of these essays to follow
the gradual development of authority out of the elements just
indicated. Historians, such as Mr. and Mrs. Green for this
country, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and Luchaire for France,
Kaufmann, Janssen, W. Arnold, and even Nitzsch, for Germany, Leo
and Botta for Italy, Byelaeff, Kostomaroff, and their followers
for Russia, and many others, have fully told that tale. They have
shown how populations, once free, and simply agreeing "to feed" a
certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the
serfs of these protectors; how "commendation" to the Church, or
to a lord, became a hard necessity for the freeman; how each
lord's and bishop's castle became a robber's nest -- how
feudalism was imposed, in a word -- and how the crusades, by
freeing the serfs who wore the cross, gave the first impulse to
popular emancipation. All this need not be retold in this place,
our chief aim being to follow the constructive genius of the
masses in their mutual-aid institutions.
At a time when the last vestiges of barbarian freedom seemed
to disappear, and Europe, fallen under the dominion of thousands
of petty rulers, was marching towards the constitution of such
theocracies and despotic States as had followed the barbarian
stage during the previous starts of civilization, or of barbarian
monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took
another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had
once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity
which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not
understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the
smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and
clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord's
castle, defied it first, attacked it next, and finally destroyed
it. The movement spread from spot to spot, involving every town
on the surface of Europe, and in less than a hundred years free
cities had been called into existence on the coasts of the
Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean,
down to the fjords of Scandinavia; at the feet of the Apennines,
the Alps, the Black Forest, the Grampians, and the Carpathians;
in the plains of Russia, Hungary, France and Spain. Everywhere
the same revolt took place, with the same features, passing
through the same phases, leading to the same results. Wherever
men had found, or expected to find, some protection behind their
town walls, they instituted their "co-jurations," their
"fraternities," their "friendships," united in one common idea,
and boldly marching towards a new life of mutual support and
liberty. And they succeeded so well that in three or four hundred
years they had changed the very face of Europe. They had covered
the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, expressing the
genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their
beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following
generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our
present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for
the future, is only a further development. And when we now look
to the forces which have produced these grand results, we find
them -- not in the genius of individual heroes, not in the mighty
organization of huge States or the political capacities of their
rulers, but in the very same current of mutual aid and support
which we saw at work in the village community, and which was
vivified and reinforced in the Middle Ages by a new form of
unions, inspired by the very same spirit but shaped on a new
model -- the guilds.
It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a
dissolution of the village community. Although the lord had
succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had
appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in
the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on
inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless,
maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities: the
common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction. In olden
times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants
received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and
asked him -- which law he intended to apply: the one he found in
the village, or the one he brought with him? And, in the first
case, they handed him the flowers and accepted him; while in the
second case they fought him.13 Now, they accepted the king's
or the lord's official whom they could not refuse; but they
maintained the folkmote's jurisdiction, and themselves nominated
six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord's judge, in
the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders.
In most cases the official had nothing left to him but to confirm
the sentence and to levy the customary fred. This precious right
of self-jurisdiction, which, at that time, meant
self-administration and self-legislation, had been maintained
through all the struggles; and even the lawyers by whom Karl the
Great was surrounded could not abolish it; they were bound to
confirm it. At the same time, in all matters concerning the
community's domain, the folkmote retained its supremacy and (as
shown by Maurer) often claimed submission from the lord himself
in land tenure matters. No growth of feudalism could break this
resistance; the village community kept its ground; and when, in
the ninth and tenth centuries, the invasions of the Normans, the
Arabs, and the Ugrians had demonstrated that military scholae
were of little value for protecting the land, a general movement
began all over Europe for fortifying the villages with stone
walls and citadels. Thousands of fortified centres were then
built by the energies of the village communities; and, once they
had built their walls, once a common interest had been created in
this new sanctuary -- the town walls -- they soon understood that
they could henceforward resist the encroachments of the inner
enemies, the lords, as well as the invasions of foreigners. A new
life of freedom began to develop within the fortified enclosures.
The medieval city was born.14
No period of history could better illustrate the constructive
powers of the popular masses than the tenth and eleventh
centuries, when the fortified villages and market-places,
representing so many "oases amidst the feudal forest," began to
free themselves from their lord's yoke, and slowly elaborated the
future city organization; but, unhappily, this is a period about
which historical information is especially scarce: we know the
results, but little has reached us about the means by which they
were achieved. Under the protection of their walls the cities'
folkmotes -- either quite independent, or led by the chief noble
or merchant families -- conquered and maintained the right of
electing the military defensor and supreme judge of the town, or
at least of choosing between those who pretended to occupy this
position. In Italy the young communes were continually sending
away their defensors or domini, fighting those who refused to go.
The same went on in the East. In Bohemia, rich and poor alike
(Bohemicae gentis magni et parvi, nobiles et ignobiles) took part
in the election;15 while, the vyeches (folkmotes) of the
Russian cities regularly elected their dukes -- always from the
same Rurik family -- covenanted with them, and sent the knyaz
away if he had provoked discontent.16 At the same time in most
cities of Western and Southern Europe, the tendency was to take
for defensor a bishop whom the city had elected itself. and so
many bishops took the lead in protecting the "immunities" of the
towns and in defending their liberties, that numbers of them were
considered, after their death, as saints and special patrons of
different cities. St. Uthelred of Winchester, St. Ulrik of
Augsburg, St. Wolfgang of Ratisbon, St. Heribert of Cologne, St.
Adalbert of Prague, and so on, as well as many abbots and monks,
became so many cities' saints for having acted in defence of
popular rights.17 And under the new defensors, whether laic or
clerical, the citizens conquered full self-jurisdiction and
self-administration for their folkmotes.18
The whole process of liberation progressed by a series of
imperceptible acts of devotion to the common cause, accomplished
by men who came out of the masses -- by unknown heroes whose very
names have not been preserved by history. The wonderful movement
of the God's peace (treuga Dei) by which the popular masses
endeavoured to put a limit to the endless family feuds of the
noble families, was born in the young towns, the bishops and the
citizens trying to extend to the nobles the peace they had
established within their town walls.19 Already at that period,
the commercial cities of Italy, and especially Amalfi (which had
its elected consuls since 844, and frequently changed its doges
in the tenth century)20 worked out the customary maritime and
commercial law which later on became a model for all Europe;
Ravenna elaborated its craft organization, and Milan, which had
made its first revolution in 980, became a great centre of
commerce, its trades enjoying a full independence since the
eleventh century.21 So also Brügge and Ghent; so also several
cities of France in which the Mahl or forum had become a quite
independent institution.22 And already during that period
began the work of artistic decoration of the towns by works of
architecture, which we still admire and which loudly testify of
the intellectual movement of the times. "The basilicae were then
renewed in almost all the universe," Raoul Glaber wrote in his
chronicle, and some of the finest monuments of medieval
architecture date from that period: the wonderful old church of
Bremen was built in the ninth century, Saint Marc of Venice was
finished in 1071, and the beautiful dome of Pisa in 1063. In
fact, the intellectual movement which has been described as the
Twelfth Century Renaissance23 and the Twelfth Century
Rationalism -- the precursor of the Reform24 date from that
period, when most cities were still simple agglomerations of
small village communities enclosed by walls.
However, another element, besides the village-community
principle, was required to give to these growing centres of
liberty and enlightenment the unity of thought and action, and
the powers of initiative, which made their force in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. With the growing diversity of
occupations, crafts and arts, and with the growing commerce in
distant lands, some new form of union was required, and this
necessary new element was supplied by the guilds. Volumes and
volumes have been written about these unions which, under the
name of guilds, brotherhoods, friendships and druzhestva, minne,
artels in Russia, esnaifs in Servia and Turkey, amkari in
Georgia, and so on, took such a formidable development in
medieval times and played such an important part in the
emancipation of the cities. But it took historians more than
sixty years before the universality of this institution and its
true characters were understood. Only now, when hundreds of guild
statutes have been published and studied, and their relationship
to the Roman collegiae, and the earlier unions in Greece and in
India,25 is known, can we maintain with full confidence that
these brotherhoods were but a further development of the same
principles which we saw at work in the gens and the village
community.
Nothing illustrates better these medieval brother hoods than
those temporary guilds which were formed on board ships. When a
ship of the Hansa had accomplished her first half-day passage
after having left the port, the captain (Schiffer) gathered all
crew and passengers on the deck, and held the following language,
as reported by a contemporary: --
"'As we are now at the mercy of God and the waves,' he said,
'each one must be equal to each other. And as we are surrounded
by storms, high waves, pirates and other dangers, we must keep a
strict order that we may bring our voyage to a good end. That is
why we shall pronounce the prayer for a good wind and good
success, and, according to marine law, we shall name the
occupiers of the judges' seats (Schöffenstellen).' Thereupon the
crew elected a Vogt and four scabini, to act as their judges. At
the end of the voyage the Vogt and the scabini. abdicated their
functions and addressed the. 'What has happened on board ship, we
crew as follows: -- must pardon to each other and consider as
dead (todt und ab sein lassen). What we have judged right, was
for the sake of justice. This is why we beg you all, in the name
of honest justice, to forget all the animosity one may nourish
against another, and to swear on bread and salt that he will not
think of it in a bad spirit. If any one, however, considers
himself wronged, he must appeal to the land Vogt and ask justice
from him before sunset.' On landing, the Stock with the fredfines
was handed over to the Vogt of the sea-port for distribution
among the poor."26
This simple narrative, perhaps better than anything else,
depicts the spirit of the medieval guilds. Like organizations
came into existence wherever a group of men -- fishermen,
hunters, travelling merchants, builders, or settled craftsmen --
came together for a common pursuit. Thus, there was on board ship
the naval authority of the captain; but, for the very success of
the common enterprise, all men on board, rich and poor, masters
and crew, captain and sailors, agreed to be equals in their
mutual relations, to be simply men, bound to aid each other and
to settle their possible disputes before judges elected by all of
them. So also when a number of craftsmen -- masons, carpenters,
stone-cutters, etc. -- came together for building, say, a
cathedral, they all belonged to a city which had its political
organization, and each of them belonged moreover to his own
craft; but they were united besides by their common enterprise,
which they knew better than any one else, and they joined into a
body united by closer, although temporary, bonds; they founded
the guild for the building of the cathedral.27 We may see the
same till now in the Kabylian. çof:28 the Kabyles have their
village community; but this union is not sufficient for all
political, commercial, and personal needs of union, and the
closer brotherhood of the çof is constituted.
As to the social characters of the medieval guild, any
guild-statute may illustrate them. Taking, for instance, the
skraa of some early Danish guild, we read in it, first, a
statement of the general brotherly feelings which must reign in
the guild; next come the regulations relative to
self-jurisdiction in cases of quarrels arising between two
brothers, or a brother and a stranger; and then, the social
duties of the brethren are enumerated. If a brother's house is
burned, or he has lost his ship, or has suffered on a pilgrim's
voyage, all the brethren must come to his aid. If a brother falls
dangerously ill, two brethren must keep watch by his bed till he
is out of danger, and if he dies, the brethren must bury him -- a
great affair in those times of pestilences -- and follow him to
the church and the grave. After his death they must provide for
his children, if necessary; very often the widow becomes a sister
to the guild.29
These two leading features appeared in every brotherhood
formed for any possible purpose. In each case the members treated
each other as, and named each other, brother and sister;30 all
were equals before the guild. They owned some "chattel" (cattle,
land, buildings, places of worship, or "stock") in common. All
brothers took the oath of abandoning all feuds of old; and,
without imposing upon each other the obligation of never
quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should degenerate
into a feud, or into a law-suit before another court than the
tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was
involved in a quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed
to support him for bad and for good; that is, whether he was
unjustly accused of aggression, or really was the aggressor, they
had to support him, and to bring things to a peaceful end. So
long as his was not a secret aggression -- in which case he would
have been treated as an outlaw -- the brotherhood stood by
him.31 If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge
the offence at once by a new aggression, the brother- hood
supplied him with a horse to run away, or with a boat, a pair of
oars, a knife and a steel for striking light; if he remained in
town, twelve brothers accompanied him to protect him; and in the
meantime they arranged the composition. They went to court to
support by oath the truthfulness of his statements, and if he was
found guilty they did not let him go to full ruin and become a
slave through not paying the due compensation: they all paid it,
just as the gens did in olden times. Only when a brother had
broken the faith towards his guild-brethren, or other people, he
was excluded from the brotherhood "with a Nothing's name" (tha
scal han maeles af brödrescap met nidings nafn).32
Such were the leading ideas of those brotherhoods which
gradually covered the whole of medieval life. In fact, we know of
guilds among all possible professions: guilds of serfs,33
guilds of freemen, and guilds of both serfs and freemen; guilds
called into life for the special purpose of hunting, fishing, or
a trading expedition, and dissolved when the special purpose had
been achieved; and guilds lasting for centuries in a given craft
or trade. And, in proportion as life took an always greater
variety of pursuits, the variety in the guilds grew in
proportion. So we see not only merchants, craftsmen, hunters, and
peasants united in guilds; we also see guilds of priests,
painters, teachers of primary schools and universities, guilds
for performing the passion play, for building a church, for
developing the "mystery" of a given school of art or craft, or
for a special recreation -- even guilds among beggars,
executioners, and lost women, all organized on the same double
principle of self-jurisdiction and mutual support.34 For
Russia we have positive evidence showing that the very "making of
Russia" was as much the work of its hunters', fishermen's, and
traders' artels as of the budding village communities, and up to
the present day the country is covered with artels.35
These few remarks show how incorrect was the view taken by
some early explorers of the guilds when they wanted to see the
essence of the institution in its yearly festival. In reality,
the day of the common meal was always the day, or the morrow of
the day, of election of aldermen, of discussion of alterations in
the statutes, and very often the day of judgment of quarrels that
had risen among the brethren,36 or of renewed allegiance to
the guild. The common meal, like the festival at the old tribal
folkmote -- the mahl or malum -- or the Buryate aba, or the
parish feast and the harvest supper, was simply an affirmation of
brotherhood. It symbolized the times when everything was kept in
common by the clan. This day, at least, all belonged to all; all
sate at the same table and partook of the same meal. Even at a
much later time the inmate of the almshouse of a London guild sat
this day by the side of the rich alderman. As to the distinction
which several explorers have tried to establish between the old
Saxon "frith guild" and the so-called "social" or "religious"
guilds -- all were frith guilds in the sense above
mentioned,37 and all were religious in the sense in which a
village community or a city placed under the protection of a
special saint is social and religious. If the institution of the
guild has taken such an immense extension in Asia, Africa, and
Europe, if it has lived thousands of years, reappearing again and
again when similar conditions called it into existence, it is
because it was much more than an eating association, or an
association for going to church on a certain day, or a burial
club. It answered to a deeply inrooted want of human nature; and
it embodied all the attributes which the State appropriated later
on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than that. It
was an association for mutual support in all circumstances and in
all accidents of life, "by deed and advise," and it was an
organization for maintaining justice -- with this difference from
the State, that on all these occasions a humane, a brotherly
element was introduced instead of the formal element which is the
essential characteristic of State interference. Even when
appearing before the guild tribunal, the guild-brother answered
before men who knew him well and had stood by him before in their
daily work, at the common meal, in the performance of their
brotherly duties: men who were his equals and brethren indeed,
not theorists of law nor defenders of some one else's
interests.38
It is evident that an institution so well suited to serve the
need of union, without depriving the individual of his
initiative, could but spread, grow, and fortify. The difficulty
was only to find such form as would permit to federate the unions
of the guilds without interfering with the unions of the village
communities, and to federate all these into one harmonious whole.
And when this form of combination had been found, and a series of
favourable circumstances permitted the cities to affirm their
independence, they did so with a unity of thought which can but
excite our admiration, even in our century of railways,
telegraphs, and printing. Hundreds of charters in which the
cities inscribed their liberation have reached us, and through
all of them -- notwithstanding the infinite variety of details,
which depended upon the more or less greater fulness of
emancipation -- the same leading ideas run. The city organized
itself as a federation of both small village communities and
guilds.
"All those who belong to the friendship of the town" -- so
runs a charter given in 1188 to the burghesses of Aire by Philip,
Count of Flanders -- "have promised and confirmed by faith and
oath that they will aid each other as brethren, in whatever is
useful and honest. That if one commits against another an offence
in words or in deeds, the one who has suffered there from will
not take revenge, either himself or his people... he will lodge a
complaint and the offender will make good for his offence,
according to what will be pronounced by twelve elected judges
acting as arbiters, And if the offender or the offended, after
having been warned thrice, does not submit to the decision of the
arbiters, he will be excluded from the friendship as a wicked man
and a perjuror.39
"Each one of the men of the commune will be faithful to his
con-juror, and will give him aid and advice, according to what
justice will dictate him" -- the Amiens and Abbeville charters
say. "All will aid each other, according to their powers, within
the boundaries of the Commune, and will not suffer that any one
takes anything from any one of them, or makes one pay
contributions" -- do we read in the charters of Soissons,
Compiègne, Senlis, and many others of the same type.40 And so
on with countless variations on the same theme.
"The Commune," Guilbert de Nogent wrote, "is an oath of
mutual aid (mutui adjutorii conjuratio)... A new and detestable
word. Through it the serfs (capite sensi) are freed from all
serfdom; through it, they can only be condemned to a legally
determined fine for breaches of the law; through it, they cease
to be liable to payments which the serfs always used to
pay."41
The same wave of emancipation ran, in the twelfth century,
through all parts of the continent, involving both rich cities
and the poorest towns. And if we may say that, as a rule, the
Italian cities were the first to free themselves, we can assign
no centre from which the movement would have spread. Very often a
small burg in central Europe took the lead for its region, and
big agglomerations accepted the little town's charter as a model
for their own. Thus, the charter of a small town, Lorris, was
adopted by eighty-three towns in south-west France, and that of
Beaumont became the model for over five hundred towns and cities
in Belgium and France. Special deputies were dispatched by the
cities to their neighbours to obtain a copy from their charter,
and the constitution was framed upon that model. However, they
did not simply copy each other: they framed their own charters in
accordance with the concessions they had obtained from their
lords; and the result was that, as remarked by an historian, the
charters of the medieval communes offer the same variety as the
Gothic architecture of their churches and cathedrals. The same
leading ideas in all of them -- the cathedral symbolizing the
union of parish and guild in the, city -- and the same infinitely
rich variety of detail.
Self-jurisdiction was the essential point, and
self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. But the commune was
not simply an "autonomous" part of the State -- such ambiguous
words had not yet been invented by that time -- it was a State in
itself. It had the right of war and peace, of federation and
alliance with its neighbours. It was sovereign in its own
affairs, and mixed with no others. The supreme political power
could be vested entirely in a democratic forum, as was the case
in Pskov, whose vyeche sent and received ambassadors, concluded
treaties, accepted and sent away princes, or went on without them
for dozens of years; or it was vested in, or usurped by, an
aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, as was the case in
hundreds of Italian and middle European cities. The principle,
nevertheless, remained the same: the city was a State and -- what
was perhaps still more remarkable -- when the power in the city
was usurped by an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, the
inner life of the city and the democratism of its daily life did
not disappear: they depended but little upon what may be called
the political form of the State.
The secret of this seeming anomaly lies in the fact that a
medieval city was not a centralized State. During the first
centuries of its existence, the city hardly could be named a
State as regards its interior organization, because the middle
ages knew no more of the present centralization of functions than
of the present territorial centralization. Each group had its
share of sovereignty. The city was usually divided into four
quarters, or into five to seven sections radiating from a centre,
each quarter or section roughly corresponding to a certain trade
or profession which prevailed in it, but nevertheless containing
inhabitants of different social positions and occupations --
nobles, merchants, artisans, or even half-serfs; and each section
or quarter constituted a quite independent agglomeration. In
Venice, each island was an independent political community. It
had its own organized trades, its own commerce in salt, its own
jurisdiction and administration, its own forum; and the
nomination of a doge by the city changed nothing in the inner
independence of the units.42 In Cologne, we see the
inhabitants divided into Geburschaften and Heimschaften
(viciniae), i.e. neighbour guilds, which dated from the
Franconian period. Each of them had its judge (Burrichter) and
the usual twelve elected sentence-finders (Schöffen), its Vogt,
and its greve or commander of the local militia.43 The story
of early London before the Conquest -- Mr. Green says -- is that
"of a number of little groups scattered here and there over the
area within the walls, each growing up with its own life and
institutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and the like, and
only slowly drawing together into a municipal union."44 And if
we refer to the annals of the Russian cities, Novgorod and Pskov,
both of which are relatively rich in local details, we find the
section (konets) consisting of independent streets (ulitsa), each
of which, though chiefly peopled with artisans of a certain
craft, had also merchants and landowners among its inhabitants,
and was a separate community. It had the communal responsibility
of all members in case of crime, its own jurisdiction and
administration by street aldermen (ulichanskiye starosty), its
own seal and, in case of need, its own forum; its own militia, as
also its self-elected priests and its, own collective life and
collective enterprise.45
The medieval city thus appears as a double federation: of all
householders united into small territorial unions -- the street,
the parish, the section -- and of individuals united by oath into
guilds according to their professions; the former being a produce
of the village-community origin of the city, while the second is
a subsequent growth called to life by new conditions.
To guarantee liberty, self-administration, and peace was the
chief aim of the medieval city. and labour, as we shall presently
see when speaking of the craft guilds, was its chief foundation.
But "production" did not absorb the whole attention of the
medieval economist. With his practical mind, he understood that
"consumption" must be guaranteed in order to obtain production;
and therefore, to provide for "the common first food and lodging
of poor and rich alike" (gemeine notdurft und gemach armer und
richer46) was the fundamental principle in each city. The
purchase of food supplies and other first necessaries (coal,
wood, etc.) before they had reached the market, or altogether in
especially favourable conditions from which others would be
excluded -- the preempcio, in a word -- was entirely prohibited.
Everything had to go to the market and be offered there for every
one's purchase, till the ringing of the bell had closed the
market. Then only could the retailer buy the remainder, and even
then his profit should be an "honest profit" only.47 Moreover,
when corn was bought by a baker wholesale after the close of the
market, every citizen had the right to claim part of the corn
(about half-a-quarter) for his own use, at wholesale price, if he
did so before the final conclusion of the bargain; and
reciprocally, every baker could claim the same if the citizen
purchased corn for re-selling it. In the first case, the corn had
only to be brought to the town mill to be ground in its proper
turn for a settled price, and the bread could be baked in the
four banal, or communal oven.48 In short, if a scarcity
visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but
apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no
one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too
often the case in our own times.
However, all such regulations belong to later periods of the
cities' life, while at an earlier period it was the city itself
which used to buy all food supplies for the use of the citizens.
The documents recently published by Mr. Gross are quite positive
on this point and fully support his conclusion to the effect that
the cargoes of subsistences "were purchased by certain civic
officials in the name of the town, and then distributed in shares
among the merchant burgesses, no one being allowed to buy wares
landed in the port unless the municipal authorities refused to
purchase them. This seem -- she adds -- to have been quite a
common practice in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland."49
Even in the sixteenth century we find that common purchases of
corn were made for the "comoditie and profitt in all things of
this.... Citie and Chamber of London, and of all the Citizens and
Inhabitants of the same as moche as in us lieth" -- as the Mayor
wrote in 1565.50 In Venice, the whole of the trade in corn is
well known to have been in the hands of the city; the "quarters,"
on receiving the cereals from the board which administrated the
imports, being bound to send to every citizen's house the
quantity allotted to him.51 In France, the city of Amiens used
to purchase salt and to distribute it to all citizens at cost
price;52 and even now one sees in many French towns the halles
which formerly were municipal dépôts for corn and salt.53 In
Russia it was a regular custom in Novgorod and Pskov.
The whole matter relative to the communal purchases for the
use of the citizens, and the manner in which they used to be
made, seems not to have yet received proper attention from the
historians of the period; but there are here and there some very
interesting facts which throw a new light upon it. Thus there is,
among Mr. Gross's documents, a Kilkenny ordinance of the year
1367, from which we learn how the prices of the goods were
established. "The merchants and the sailors," Mr. Gross writes,
"were to state on oath the first cost of the goods and the
expenses of transportation. Then the mayor of the town and two
discreet men were to name the price at which the wares were to be
sold." The same rule held good in Thurso for merchandise coming
"by sea or land." This way of "naming the price" so well answers
to the very conceptions of trade which were current in medieval
times that it must have been all but universal. To have the price
established by a third person was a very old custom; and for all
interchange within the city it certainly was a widely-spread
habit to leave the establishment of prices to "discreet men" --
to a third party -- and not to the vendor or the buyer. But this
order of things takes us still further back in the history of
trade -- namely, to a time when trade in staple produce was
carried on by the whole city, and the merchants were only the
commissioners, the trustees, of the city for selling the goods
which it exported. A Waterford ordinance, published also by Mr.
Gross, says "that all manere of marchandis what so ever kynde
thei be of... shal be bought by the Maire and balives which bene
commene biers [common buyers, for the town] for the time being,
and to distribute the same on freemen of the citie (the propre
goods of free citisains and inhabitants only excepted)." This
ordinance can Hardly be explained otherwise than by admitting
that all the exterior trade of the town was carried on by its
agents. Moreover, we have direct evidence of such having been the
case for Novgorod and Pskov. It was the Sovereign Novgorod and
the Sovereign Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to
distant lands.
We know also that in nearly all medieval cities of Middle and
Western Europe, the craft guilds used to buy, as a body, all
necessary raw produce, and to sell the produce of their work
through their officials, and it is hardly possible that the same
should not have been done for exterior trade -- the more so as it
is well known that up to the thirteenth century, not only all
merchants of a given city were considered abroad as responsible
in a body for debts contracted by any one of them, but the whole
city as well was responsible for the debts of each one of its
merchants. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth century the towns
on the Rhine entered into special treaties abolishing this
responsibility.54 And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich
document published by Mr. Gross, from which document we learn
that the merchant guild of this town was constituted by all who
had the freedom of the city, and who wished to pay their
contribution ("their hanse") to the guild, the whole community
discussing all together how better to maintain the merchant
guild, and giving it certain privileges. The merchant guild of
Ipswich thus appears rather as a body of trustees of the town
than as a common private guild.
In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the
more we see that it was not simply a political organization for
the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt
at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village
community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for
consumption and production, and for social life altogether,
without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving
full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each
separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce,
and political organization. How far this attempt has been
successful will be best seen when we have analyzed in the next
chapter the organization of labour in the medieval city and the
relations of the cities with the surrounding peasant population.